I found this to be a useful perspective -written by my first teacher -- it might have more of a resonance to the material of G and M as well as Bennett and Ouspenksy as he was on the tail end of that particular era.
Chapter 17 Male and Female
The relationship of male with female has been much misunderstood and distorted. Essentially, the male organism is penetrative and the impulse is from the centre outwards. Thus sensually and sexually, the male urge towards personal integration of being is outward toward externals. The female organism is the opposite. Sensual perception and sexual needs commence in externals and end at the centre. For one, the world is around it and for the other, it is around the world.
The female aspect is at its most positive when reaching out mentally to externals and expressing caring compassion through intellect. The male aspect is at its most positive when turning inwards mentally to the intuitive, caring feminine aspect and penetrating its own nature.
When these two aspects are aware of each other’s function and needs, and are sufficiently developed to relinquish their self-nature – there is a perfect union of Love and Wisdom.
If either male or female is complete, and there is an inner union of male and female within them, then they are able to receive and to give at a level which is non-needing, non-demanding and non-manipulative.
It is a comparatively rare and amazing kind of relationship when you get two people, both of whom are internally sexually fused.
Thee are four possible kinds of contact between any two organisms, which can be crudely stated as male to male, female to female, male to female and female to male.
I have said before than when any two organisms meeting, the first thing that has to be sorted out and understood is what the potential sexual relationship between them is – until then no real contact can be established. It will happen just as surely in the relating between a human being and an animal, or a flower, or anything that has a kind of sentient life: the only difference lies in the speed of the decision.
That is the first negotiation. Then, in the traditional way of relating and, because of the tendency for someone who is genitally male or genitally female to believe they are totally that, there are probably two relationships possible. The first is the well-known me-Tarzan, you-Jane, that is male to female, and there is the possibility of another one of the four, in support of that first one. These are relationships based on need – where there is an investment of identity in objects, events and people. As that is let go and there is more self-contentment, there is a possibility of the other relationships opening, and we will call that relating. What we all obviously have to try to do is get to that point of relating, rather than being trapped within the traditional kind of relationship.
A very completed receiving is a very completed act of giving. It’s a letting go, an opening. It’s accepting and taking in something from someone else in the spirit it has come, without trying to transform it into the way you would like to receive it or to take it. Mostly when people get into trouble with the difference between taking and receiving it is because they try to insist that the things they want to happen, happen in their way and not in the way it’s coming from the other person. It happens at a verbal level quite often, and it’s quite subtle. Someone asks a question and I answer and they say, ‘Ah, it’s like such and such’; they haven’t taken what I’ve said, they’ve tried to translate it into something they already have, which is comfortable. Nothing is like anything else. Take the answers, the words, the gifts but don’t try to translate them into the way you would like to have them; that is either a form of taking or a rejection of what is coming. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an explanation, a gift, an act of affection or love, it is all the same. In that sense, receiving is the act of giving.
If any being, comprised of two distinct parts (which should be in union) takes as its identity one aspect of that union, and believes itself to be solely that, then it will be continually manipulating the reflection or the projection of the other aspect of itself in the world. If there is the idea that someone who happens to be biologically born with male physical characteristics is all male, then the objects, events and people in whom identity is invested, will be of a particular kind; that maleness or structuring characteristic will be self-focused and self-centred and will believe its maleness, whether intellectually, psychologically or sexually, to be the most important aspect. This is usually what produces the problems in male sexuality, because ultimately what has to be understood is that the thing that makes a man a good lover is not his masculinity but his femininity – how else could he understand woman? The classic male right-sided being that rejects the feminine characteristics within itself, will do the same towards women in the world – taking, demanding, imposing, (women obviously will do a comparable opposite). When there is no dependency upon external objects, events or people there is a wholeness and from that can come a true and full exchange. Otherwise you get two people both taking and that’s just sexual karate!
We put our needs into objects, events and people out there, and make them vital to our identity, or to our security of being, and that becomes a taking need.
It becomes something that we demand or invite, or make subtle signals for. At a particular level we need food and certain activities of the body to sustain us, since we’re living in the human world but if the need is one which is vital to our identity and our security, that’s a totally different matter.
When we feed off objects, events and people it diminishes us.
If we let go of the investment of identity in those needs, and come to ease and calm and contentment with what is present in any moment, then the beauty and purity of our relationship with events and people and objects in every moment is of a high quality and there is no dependency in it.
At that point we become of value in the world, and are able to enter into some kind of exchange and sharing, which is interdependence – the understanding, in mundane terms, that there is such a thing as here and there, but we are not tangled up in it, or dependent on it. We know that we are in relationship with everything else in the world, but we don’t compare; we don’t say that one thing is more important than another, one thing is better than another, because that means we have a dependency upon the better things to give us a better identity, and we ignore the beauty in the things which are not traditionally regarded as beautiful or pleasant.
That reduces the level and number of descriptions one has in the world. It also reduces what might be called anger to fire or heat rising. One accepts that there are mental and emotional states, but says: ‘there is’ rather than ‘I have’; thus we un-hook our dependency on them for our identity.
Many people have anger or some other emotion as an object or event on which they rely for identity, because of the sensations and the feelings of strength or pleasure or righteousness that it gives them.
As we are un-hooking from the dependency on things, then our attitude changes, and we see them increasingly as elements – as air and earth and fire and water, revolving in space.
We don’t see any difference between a set of conditions here and a set of conditions there. We observe, within the discipline of understanding, that this object, which is regarded by the world as beautiful, contains as many traps when we associate ourselves with it, as this object which is called ugly and which we try to avoid or feel superior to.
These two things, the beautiful and the ugly, the right and the wrong, the pleasant and the unpleasant, are in fact air and earth and fire and water revolving in space. Essentially we see no difference, and that means within us there is no difference, which means that we are clear and calm.
We can have preferences, we can say we like such and such, but if it isn’t available, it doesn’t matter, and we mean it.
The whole realm of suffering of human beings is based upon two things – ‘Getting What We Don’t Want’ or ‘Wanting What We Don’t Get’.
Where we have a need and an investment of identity in objects, events or people, then we are either in a situation of getting what we don’t want or wanting what we don’t get.
When what arises is sufficient, and we see it clearly and in depth, then we are content. Then we are of some use to this world and to other people.
Until we have let go of that we are a burden, and we are prone to enter into conspiracies with other people’s needs and investments, and play the most elaborate games to sustain each other in the avoidance of the aloneness.
Within that, the whole realm of the difference between receiving and taking, and between giving and imposing, are clearly seen.
We sometimes subject other people to the most horrific moral, mental and physical pressures in order to insist that they have in their life what we think they ought to have – then we compound the felony by saying we’re doing it out of love. If love means that everything in your world is a reflection of you and has been arranged by you, I don’t think much of it. For a large section of the community, well-educated in this error, this is family life – doing what you’re told – being possessed – doing what’s good for you.
When I am presented with problems in people’s relationships I find precisely the same problems arising with the inner relationship between the right and the left side, the so-called male and female, in that person. The right side of the being can behave like a male chauvinist pig to the left side of the being in both men and women, and that balance has to be reorientated.
It can be done by a temporary immobilization of the right side – not in a harsh or rejecting way, but just a holding back to allow the left side to develop, if possible, towards a total ambidexterity.
When you start adjusting the physical balance you are dealing with vital energies that go deeply into the organism. When both sides are operating with some kind of mutuality and understanding, the centre of operations sinks lower and lower, until there is a fusion at centre.
At whatever level we look at it, the point of union, for both male and female, is this point here at centre, which is why it’s the point of meditation. You find this is in the symbolism of the so-called ‘erotic’ painting of the East. It’s not erotic, it’s highly spiritual, because it represents that union. If we can bring that about within ourselves then we have a complete being to offer to somebody else.
The Taoists say some interesting things in this area: they tend to symbolize it in either sexual or gender terms. The basic statement is that when the male and the female aspect in physical, psychic or intellectual terms are not in harmony, then the ideal union between yang and yin, right and left, is lost and then we have lost the art of immortality. Mortality arises because the art of that union has been lost. In physical terms they say that when the art of sexual union is lost, misused or is not skilful then all manner of ailments of the body arise, and when the art is fulfilled then all physical ailments are automatically treated or the antidote arises within the energy of the body.
You can also take that in terms of the inner union, of male or female, or in terms of the relationship between the intellect and the emotions. When the resources at a physical, psychic or spiritual level are interacting harmoniously and the ancient skills are applied, then there is immortality, because the union of male and female is representative of the union of heaven and earth. When that union is imperfect, in other words when there is a taking rather than a giving then mortality arises, and with mortality ageing, sickness and death arise. So there, we’re now entering the Taoist phase.
The right-sided aspect of the male contains both the macho and the structuring, logical mind. The left side includes the little boy, and of course the homosexual factor. Sometimes these two sides never really meet.
For the female, basically the left side is the girl and the right side is the mother. That is the more organizing, controlling, supplying part.
There is a classic pattern of relationship between the left side of the man and the right side of the woman – the mother-little boy syndrome with all its games of tantrums and sexuality!
The factor which comes to maturity in the right side of the female, is not only mother, but also the career woman, and it is a dominant factor. In some cultures this factor is recognized, and a woman can be a complete woman. In the West, it hasn’t really happened that way. It’s gone into a sort of negative masculinity, or even worse the masculinity’s gone into a negative femininity.
It’s a vast subject, and I’m dealing with it simplistically, but there’s no doubt that the more the intuitive aspect understands the working of reason and intellect, and the more the reason and intellect understand the working of the intuitive, the more possibility there is of a contact between faith and knowledge blending to produce a loving wisdom.
There are many different layers of consciousness within every being, from the gross to the higher. Sexuality can be either – the higher the level the more the tendency is to fusion. Orgasm without thought for the partner may well be satisfying, but it is erotic rather than sexual. It is the preoccupation of one part of the being which is taking more than its share.
Freak out – whether by passionate encounter or by hallucinogen, which is also reaction to external stimuli stirring the store-consciousness to produce hitherto unimagined patterns into conscious registration but not liberating them from their prison storehouse, is passive and cannot lead to insight or wisdom. It can produce an unusual self-consciousness – and a certain honest expression of confusion – which is one step better than blind apathy or anxiety neuroses – but that is where it ends.
If there is no development from that point of honesty, the expression of confusion itself becomes the end point rather than the means.
If we look at the sexual act as such, there is an idea it is a primitive urge primarily for reproduction – there’s much more to it than that. We have to accept that in any organism, the first experience is the single cell from which the dualistic organism develops. That single cell is corrupted into multiplication by the need for sensation. It needs a dualistic set-up in order to have sensation and to split itself into here and there.
So the true urge, both in sexuality and also in meditation – because the two are immensely close together – is for fusion – back into oneness.
Insight is the fusion of the two aspects of being within the meditator, meeting at the point of sexual union. Which is why, and I’m not being flippant, if you want to improve your sex life, improve your meditation; the backward circle and the out-breath are the very essence of the best sexual activity. Everything that can go wrong with sexuality is contained in the forward circle and a rather quick, sharp in-breath.
The true urge between beings is thus not reproductive in motive, but a need for integration of both aspects. When there is a holding to ritual roles of male and female in society then there is a denial of those most basic needs. Ideals are sought in personal relationships, dependent upon conditioned memories, and there is an attraction to the idealized rather than the ideal. In denying their positive aspects, men invariably remain shackled to the concepts of virility and women to protective cosseting which perpetuate it.
In unaware societies restless needs to break free from the rituals result in women adopting male attitudes and challenging men in a male way – thus denying their own femininity and increasing the latent little boy/homosexuality of the males. That they succeed only in aping the other’s negative characteristics is inevitable.
The influence of Christian dogmatic attitudes about the ‘original’ sinfulness of Man, and the seducing agency of Woman as a tool of the Devil through sexual knowledge – explaining much of the resentful domination and sexual dependence of Western man on ‘their’ woman – has made it extremely difficult, here in the West, to experience a loving rapport without a chemical reaction of sexual feelings or guilts.
This is probably the greatest barrier to mental freedom.
The role and place of women in oriental societies is quite different, and although they may seem similarly structured ‘against’ women, the positive femininity of the oriental women and the love and respect accorded to her by ‘her’ men-folk, is something the West can seldom appreciate.
Likewise, consider the difference between the religious attitudes of praying for others and the world, and the contemplative self-awareness which is concerned only with filling the being with the fourfold attitudes of loving-kindness, compassion, tranquillity and sympathetic joy, before overflowing, without any form of ‘self’ consciousness, to others.
These are the basic oppositions of attitudes in Eastern and Western systems. Of course this is not to suggest or imply that self-centredness, cruelty, conceit and sensual preoccupation do not exist in the East – of course they do – but the attitudes to them and about the way to relinquish them are different.
The oldest philosophical observation in the world is that you can never influence others, only yourself. No woman will be liberated by denying her femininity – any more than man will by denying his masculinity. The one becomes pent up sensually and externally, the other emotionally and internally. Both become users of the other.
But seriously, look at this, the marketing. Surely a near-future addition to the expanding list of sexual preferences.
